Business and Philosophy Alain de Botton 1. There are few words that seem to have less to say to one other than business and philosophy. One seems the epitome of hard-headed pragmatism, the other the home of all that is unrealistic, other-wordly and irrelevant in human affairs. I feel this incompatibility deeply. It pains me because some of the people I most admire on the planet are involved in philosophy on the one hand and business on the other – and both camps are unusually convinced that they have nothing to say to one another. My dream is of a world where they would start to be in dialogue, and would realise how much they could derive from the opposing camp. Plato famously said that the world would improve only when philosophers became kings or kings philosophers. Change kings to business people, and you have my view on the subject. Philosophy should start to be more interested in changing reality rather than merely interpreting it. And business should start to focus on the ultimate ends of life, rather than simply the road to profit (though the two are not as far apart as philosophers can sometimes suggest). This rapprochement would lead to uncomfortable questions for both parties. Business would ask philosophy why it had not managed to stimulate desire in its audience. Why has philosophy so easily persuaded itself that it is a minority pursuit that cannot hope to engage with ordinary people's dilemmas? At the same time, why has business resigned itself just to fulfilling people's desires, rather than - more ambitiously - trying to shape them? Capitalism has been phenomenally successful at delivering goods to people. It has been less talented at getting us to ask what goods we need – and in the process, investigating with greater subtelty the true relationship between fulfilment and prosperity. 2. Introducing philosophy and business to one another means starting to ask fundamental questions about the directions of our societies, and most immediately, about the role of money within them. When we think about what we currently understand by a successful person, it is hard not to imagine the acquision of money playing a central role in the portrait. The category of the successful person comprises both men and women, of any race, who have been able to accumulate money through their own activities (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad branches of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research). Because societies are practically trusted to be meritocratic, financial achievements are understood to be ‘deserved’. The ability to accumulate wealth is prized for reflecting the presence of at least four cardinal virtues: creativity, courage, intelligence and stamina. The presence of other virtues – humility or godliness for example – rarely detains attention. Achievements are not attributed, as in past societies, to ‘luck’, ‘providence’, or ‘God’ – a reflection of modern secular societies’ faith in individual will-power. Financial failures are, correspondingly, judged to be merited, with unemployment bearing some of the shame of physical cowardice in warrior eras. Money is invested with an ethical quality. Its presence indicates the virtue of its owner, as do the material goods it can buy. A prosperous way of life signal worthiness, while the ownership of an ancient car or threadbare home may spark suppositions of moral 1 deficiency. Aside from offering high status, wealth is promoted on the basis of its capacity to deliver happiness, through its capacity to grant access to a range of ever- changing consumer goods – whose absence may fill us with pity and wonder when we consider the restricted lives of previous generations. 3. However natural such a vision may appear, it is of course – a philosophical perspective alerts us – only the work of humans; a recent development dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century, brought into being by a host of identifiable factors. Furthermore, the philosophical perspective would add, the ideal is occasionally simple-minded, at times unfair and perhaps not wholly unchangeable. No aspect of the modern ideal has come under greater scrutiny than the association it constructs between wealth and virtue – and poverty and moral dubiousness. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen described how money had in the early nineteenth century emerged as the central criterion in shaping the way commercial societies evaluated their members: ‘[Wealth has become] the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession has become necessary in order to have any reputable standing in the community. It has become indispensable to acquire property in order to retain one’s good name… Those members of the community who fall short of [a relatively high standard of wealth] will suffer in the esteem of their fellow men; and consequently they will suffer also in their own esteem’. In a commercial society, it would, Veblen implied, be almost impossible to hold on to the thought that one was virtuous and yet poor. The most unmaterialistically minded person would sense an imperative to accumulate wealth and demonstrate possession of it to escape opprobrium, and would feel anxious and to blame as a result of a failure to do so. Accordingly, the possession of a great many material goods becomes necessary not principally because these goods yield pleasure (though they may do this too), but because they confer honour. In the ancient world, a debate had raged among philosophers about what was materially necessary for happiness and what unnecessary. Epicurus, for one, had argued that simple food and shelter were necessary, but expensive houses and luxurious dishes could safely be bypassed by all rational, philosophically minded people. However, reviewing the argument many centuries later in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith wryly pointed out that in modern, materialistic societies there were no doubt countless things which were unnecessary from the point of view of physical survival, but at the same time a great many more things had, practically speaking, come to be counted as ‘necessaries’, because no one could be thought respectable and so lead a psychologically comfortable life without owning them: ‘By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people’. 2 Since Smith’s day, economists have been almost unanimous in subscribing to the idea that what defines, and lends bitterness to, the state of poverty is not so much direct physical suffering as the shame that flows from the negative reactions of others to one’s state, from the way that poverty flouts what Smith termed ‘the established rules of decency’. In The Affluent Society (1958), J.K. Galbraith proposed, with a bow to Smith, ‘People are poverty-stricken whenever their income, even if adequate for survival, falls markedly behind that of the community. Then they cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency; and they cannot wholly escape, therefore, the judgement of the larger community that they are indecent’. 4. It is this idea that ‘decency’ should be attached to wealth – and ‘indecency’ to poverty – that forms the core of one strand of sceptical complaint against the modern idea of success. Why should a failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area of a far larger, more multi-faceted project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual’s morals? The reasons are not mysterious. To earn money frequently calls upon virtues of character. To hold down almost any job requires intelligence, energy, forethought and the ability to cooperate with others. Indeed, the more lucrative the job, the greater the merits it may demand. Lawyers and surgeons not only earn higher salaries than street cleaners, their occupations typically involve more sustained effort and skill. A day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, wrote Adam Smith, because not having such a shirt would imply a degree of poverty which, Smith’s contemporaries presumed: ‘nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct’. Only if a man was a congenital drunk, unreliable, thieving or childishly insubordinate would he be refused the modest employment that buying a linen shirt requires – in which case, one can appreciate how the ownership of a shirt might safely be taken as a minimum guarantee of good character. It is a short step from here to go on to imagine that extreme good conduct and many virtues must lie behind the acquisition of cupboards full of linen shirts and yachts, mansions and jewels. The notion of a status symbol, a costly material object that confers respect upon its owner, rests upon the widespread and not improbable idea that the acquisition of the most expensive goods must inevitably demand the greatest of all qualities of character.